Sharing information related to Qt, Maemo development and some other information

Saturday, September 28, 2013

Dealing with device for Ubuntu Touch development

Lately I am working on Ubuntu Touch Calendar application. Recently I also got device and now I wanted to run and test application on real device.

So it seems there are two type of Ubuntu Touch image,
one cdimage-touch, which is read-write image but it does not support over the air update and
other ubuntu-system, which is read only, but which can be updated over the air

For development purpose its better to use cdimage-touch, as you can transfer file from computer to device and test it as its read-write. Its not possible with ubuntu-system image. But if you just want to see how Ubuntu Touch looks and test applications then ubuntu-system image is good.

You can follow steps mentioned here, to install appropriate image on device.

Now we have proper image on device, then following are some command which can be used to install the application and transfer file form computer to device.

adb push can be used to tranfer file from computer to device, just like copy

BTW, " /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/" is the path where test case are installed by default on device. And above command is coping updated test case file to device.

If you want to run test on device then you can use following command on your desktop terminal.

phablet-test-run calendar_app

Same way we can transfer QML files as well. Like below.

adb push YearView.qml /usr/share/calendar-app/YearView.qml

It seems "/usr/share/" is path where applications are installed.

If you want to install complete application built from source code, then you can run following command to build application from source. You need to run this command from directory where debian folder is residing.

debuild -uc -us -b

This will generate .deb file in parent folder. You can copy this file to device via adb push. Then you can goto device's shell by adb shell command.

adb push DEB_FILENAME.deb /tmp
adb shell

And finally install .deb by running following command on device's shell.